SP2016 Central Administration web site redundancy/high availability setup

Question

SP2016 on-premise. Two WFE/App servers in custom role. Server 1 hosts CA; URL is Server1:Port#. We did not set up/do not use FQDN url, custom FSQDN url, or AAM (we do for Intranet/My Sites but *not CA).

Confused about how to make CA web site redundant/highly available, which we want to do now. So that if one server goes down, we can reach CA on other server. The CA Windows service (services.msc) is running on both servers, but not provisioned on the second server (CA > services on server shows Stopped). Found/read https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/34220.sharepoint-2016-managing-central-administration-web-application-provisioning-unprovisioning.aspx and a few other articles.

My understanding is: We can provision second server using CA > services on server > Start. The CA web site is then created on second server. The *same (existing) CA database is used.

Questions:

I assume the 2nd server's CA URL will be Server2; will it use the same port by default?

After provisioning the 2nd server for CA, if we then create a common custom FQDN URL using AAM, add this URL to DNS and each server's registry location for CA URL, and add CA to our LB, is that all we need to do to complete redundancy/high availability, and be able to reach CA using one common URL? Without breaking CA.

Thanks,
Joan

Answer 1

Hi @jremmc
If the server 1 has something wrong, we could run sharepoint product configuration wizard to install a new CA which will still use the same prot.

For more information, you could refer to:
https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3786/running-sharepoint-central-administration-on-more-than-one-server/

Note: Microsoft is providing this information as a convenience to you. The sites are not controlled by Microsoft. Microsoft cannot make any representations regarding the quality, safety, or suitability of any software or information found there. Please make sure that you completely understand the risk before retrieving any suggestions from the above link.

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